There’s A War On Part 7: There’s A Crack In Everything, That’s How The Light Gets In

[Trigger Warning for the whole series, as it deals with rape and abuse. This part, however, contains less in the way of graphic descriptions of abuse than previous parts.]

This is the last part. If you’ve read this far, thanks for staying with me.

The title’s a Leonard Cohen reference. If that’s trite, then I’m okay with trite. But here’s the lyric that I’m really thinking of, from Beginning of a Great Adventure, from Lou Reed’s Reagan-era album New York: “It might be fun to have a kid I could pass something on to/ something better than rage, pain, anger and hurt.” He put that album out when I was in high school, and now there are folks in the TNG groups who were not born then. Some of these people are twenty years younger than me, that’s a whole generation. Some of my kinkster friends, I’m almost old enough to be their dad, for me that just sort of changes how I look at it.

I don’t need the public scene for me. I don’t need the orgs and the parties. The cops are not going to come knocking on my door and look for a singletail or check my wife’s body for bruises. Where and how I live, with the class and race and other privileges that go with it and all that, you can tell me to worry all you want, but I won’t. I tell doctors about my kinks if I need to for complete medical treatment, and I just expect them to act like a professional about it, even if I have no idea if they’re kink-friendly: they’re more afraid of me than I am of them. (They’re right to be.) So … it’s not for me. I can close my doors and play with my spouse the way I like to play and the chances that the outside world will be able to influence that are really small.

People are being raped, and groped and fondled without consent, being coerced and pressured to do things they don’t want to do at clubs and parties, and it’s not me and it’s not my spouse. But I care that it happens. I could shut my door and play the way I like and ignore all that, but that’s what entitled privileged douches do with their privilege when they don’t care about justice. That’s “I got mine, Jack.” That’s not the right thing to do. I try to tell my kids to do the right thing, even if it’s hard, so I need to expect that of myself or I’m not much of an example. The right thing is to speak when something wrong is going on and to raise my voice until I can’t raise it any more, or until speaking up makes a difference.

It’s not very hopeful to catalogue the problems — useful, but not hopeful, and I’d rather say something about what we can do, with what we have, where we are.

Self-Defense For Bottoms: Defensive Negotiation

I said that miscommunications really happen. Anything that reduces that makes the deliberate violation of boundaries stand out more. I said in Mythcommunications that the lesson was that:

Clear communication of “no” isn’t primarily going to avoid miscommunication — rather, it’s a meta-message. Clear communication against the undercurrent that “no” is rude and should be softened is a sign of the willingness to fight, to yell, to report.

This idea, in my view, ports handily to a BDSM context, even though I think that actual miscommunication is much more common in BDSM. Clear communication avoids actual miscommunication, and also deters abusers by letting them know that a target will make it comparatively harder to get away with calling a deliberate violation a miscommunication.

(I’ll note, as an aside, that the general social disfavoring of “no” that conversational analysis, among other disciplines, identifies is a lot like the way safewords are treated. Many bottoms, particularly subs and particularly women feel a lot of pressure not to safeword: as if it’s a rejection, as if it’s a disappointment, as if it’s selfish.)

Hard limits and safewords in writing. Some people negotiate forever by email or PM or whatever, and some meet at a party and decide to play. But there are a few items that are really important, that are usually the subject of negotitation and are repeatedly the subject of boundary violations. These can be covered in an email, a PM or a text message and they can be covered fast. Once they’re in writing, there’s a record and that reduces any uncertainty about what was said. It’s not a complete solution, but it is a deterrent.

The two most frequent boundary violations I hear are (1) penetration and (2) safer sex practices. Clear, hard limits not to be renegotiated in scene can be set forth by text message even in a two minute negotiation before a public scene between strangers. Remember in Part 1, the story about Jay Wiseman and the rope bottom who kept negotiating for no sexual touching and kept getting raped? Remember Mollena Williams in Part 2? Those perpetrators would have wanted to do those things no matter what was said or written –would have wanted to, but would they have done them? In one of the blind items in Part 3, where the top punched the bottom in anger, the contract said no play in anger, and he took the trouble to get rid of it. I’m thinking of a simple text that says, “NO penile penetration, safeword is RED, not to be renegotiated” or “safeword is red, piv with condom only, no anal penetration.” There are other items that may be critical and people should always learn to negotiate for what they need: I’m not talking about negotiation best practices. I’m talking about deterence: putting in writing the boundaries that are commonly violated so as make a record that could cause trouble for an abuser later.

We can’t set these things up as mandatory practices for bottoms because they’ll just be absorbed into the existing BDSM victim-blaming canon: self-defense training is good, after the fact a failure to take some possible precaution no more absolves an abuser than failure to lock a car excuses auto theft, and I’ve never seen anyone get victim-blamed for forgetting to lock a car door.

Self-Improvement for Tops: To Err Is Human, To Get Defensive Is Counterproductive

Aftercare isn’t only the part that looks after the bottom’s emotional needs. On my account, properly understood, aftercare has three components: the bottom’s emotional needs, the top’s emotional needs, and post-scene learning. Some folks don’t need a lot of aftercare for their emotional needs. Some tops don’t really get top drop, some bottoms don’t need or even want a lot of looking after, but there’s always room to learn something. One dominant I know always asks her bottoms, “Was there anything I did that you were not comfortable with?” and “Was there anything I did that you wish I hadn’t done?” This tends to work better after the initial rush of hormones and emotions from play has a chance to settle down, and lots of people do following-day check-ins, especially after big scenes.

There are two things to be accomplished here. The first is for the tops themselves. I top too, and with just one partner for over a decade. You know what? I am still learning. We push, we talk, we learn, we try things. I make mistakes! Yes, I do! And we talk about them. Technical errors, miscommunications, and even landmines, as I discussed in Part 5. Ignoring these things or pretending they don’t need to be discussed doesn’t do anyone any good.

Talking about the things that went wrong helps the top. We learn from our mistakes only when we know what they are. We may think that all the perceptions we have in the course of a scene are accurate. Well, every litigator I know will tell you that when you take a deposition and then read the transcript, the record you made is different from the record you think you made. And folks I know in medicine tell me that doctors who think they know everything from image tests are often surprised by autopsies and pathology results which show that you really can’t see everything from a scan. We don’t have perfect information, and cross-checking our perceptions of another person’s reactions and state of mind is an invaluable, irreplaceable process.

Talking about things that went wrong helps the bottom. If something went wrong and it wasn’t a deliberate violation, the best way to clear the air is for the bottom to say what happened and be heard, and not get shut down. When the harm in not intentional, that’s often enough. When the harm is not intentional, that is the first act and sine qua non of amends.

Talking about what went wrong, finally, helps the culture. What we need to do is separate the predators from the underbrush they operate in, the climate that grants the SL-Op, to put them in a position where their deliberate behavior is not easily disguised as something else. Hiding mistakes and denying them makes the mess-up look like the deliberate wrong, and the one who erred act like the abuser. We all need those who make mistakes to act like people who care and don’t want to make mistakes again, so that those who keep on and keep on violating limits look like exactly what they are.

We all need it to become unacceptable and aberrant to get defensive, deny, blame and shut down when our mistakes are pointed out. If a bottom says, “when I was in subspace and you were calling me names, we hadn’t talked about that and it was really icky for me,” for example, it has to be unacceptable to say, “I’m not a mindreader! You should have told me!” How about, “Sorry. I didn’t realize. I messed up. Won’t happen again.” The bottom may not have even known how it would feel; we don’t all know our limits and triggers until we stumble on them. Those are the landmines. The bottom can learn from the experience, about theirself and their limits, but the top can, too. Acting like all communication failures are solely or principally the bottom’s fault is counterproductive, first because it shuts down the conversation, but second because that’s how the abusers act; and the abusers have more SL-Op if more people act like they do.

I’m not saying this because I think it will make abusers better people. It won’t. They do what they do on purpose and they can’t be fixed, only deterred. I’m saying what I think tops can do to look less like abusers, to create an environment where abuse looks aberrant and abusers stand out, so they can be dealt with.

What the Rest Of Us Can Do:

Talk About Ethics, Expect Ethics

Doing things to people that they don’t consent to is wrong. We all need to stop pretending that it’s rude to say that. Violating limits isn’t cute or funny or edgy. Joking about violating limits isn’t cute or funny or edgy.[1] Kate Harding, speaking in a vanilla context, said something that I think is very true in this context also:

But please listen, and please trust me on this one: you have probably, at some point in your life, engaged in that kind of talk with a man who really, truly hates women–to the extent of having beaten and/or raped at least one.And you probably didn’t know which one he was.

And that guy? Thought you were on his side.

Bold in original. I talked in Part 2 about the “that guy,” the “stranger in the bushes” of the BDSM community. That guy is around, on the web and the fringes, and sometimes even at the core of our communities. If you joke, “hey, I know she said no X, but we should totally X!”, that guy loves your joke. He thinks it’s awesome that you said it, because he totally wants to do that. And while you know that you absolutely may not do that …that guy doesn’t. And now he thinks you’re on his side.

Zero Tolerance for Impairment

If you can’t do BDSM without getting a buzz on, you shouldn’t be doing BDSM. Call me puritan, I don’t give a shit. It’s a recipe for disaster and a way for abusers to use drugs and alcohol to incapacitate potential partners or excuse their violations. We just have to stop putting up with people who want to play impaired.

If we refuse to listen, he can continue to pretend that the rapist is some guy in the parking lot late at night, when it’s actually him, in our friends’ bedrooms half an hour after last call. If we let that happen, we’re part of the problem.

The rapists can’t be your friends, and if you are loyal to them even when faced with the evidence of what they do, you are complicit.

The only way we can really change what goes on is to change the culture, to eliminate the dynamics that allow the abusers to blend in and make their conduct look normal. We need to create environments where the abusers stick out like a sore thumb. It’s not easy to say I fucked up. It’s uncomfortable. It’s easier not to take responsibility. That’s how children deal with it: they blame the dog, their sibling, or pretend they don’t know. Grown ups take responsibility. I just don’t think there’s any serious downside to admitting to mistakes, owning bad judgments. The harm is done; acting grown up about it can only help the healing.

I hear a lot of people who top saying that they’re afraid of the conversation that has started, that they are afraid someone will name them for having done something wrong. I understand that. I don’t like being criticized either. But there’s a huge difference between being criticized for fucking up and blowing a boundary, and being criticized for deliberately blowing a boundary. The first is just ordinary human fallibility, and the second is evil. I do not believe that there’s any reason to think that people are going to be shunned if they fuck up and own it. Shit, all the people I know who have made serious fuck-ups doing BDSM, if they’ve owned up to it, they’re good with the person on the receiving end. (It’s a lot like doctors in malpractice suits: the statistics show that doctors who admit mistakes tend not to get sued, even for serious mistakes, while those who act like assholes and try to shut down the discussion do tend to get sued.) There may be a few exceptions, but as a general proposition, there’s every reason from human experience to believe that saying, “I messed up” is not only the right thing, but the smart thing.

And what we end up with is an environment where people don’t try to sweep the past under the carpet, where a top can say, “yeah, that went really wrong, zie went nonverbal on me and I didn’t realize how deep zie was.” If we can all just say, “yeah, that happened to me once,” we have an environment that the predators can’t really operate in, because when three people say, “yeah, ze did that to me, too …” the game is up. People who admit mistakes and learn from mistakes tend not to repeat them. People who tend to repeat the same mistake … well, usually it’s not a mistake.

And as we create the freedom to air this stuff, we come to the hardest part. We have to start to listen to what the issues are and decide how to treat the people who keep having the issues. Nobody is going to show up with a score sheet or bingo card and make it easy, we’re just going to have to pay attention and think about who is acting in good faith and who isn’t. If we really want to make excuses for our friends, we always can. We can explain away an infinite number of fuck-ups and blowups and badly handled scenes if we’re determined to exonerate. When our friends fuck up, we need to expect them to act consistently with good faith. If they don’t, we need to be willing to change our understanding about their good faith.

If you decide that your friends can’t possibly be abusers, you’re part of the problem. If you decide that anyone who is an abuser can’t possibly be your friend, you’re part of the solution. It is up to you whether you want to listen to the survivors and expect better from tops, or whether you want to pretend that you “don’t do drama.”

[1] It may be terror play, but terror play is the kind of thing that you negotiate first. We all know, if we’re half-way competent, that terror play could do permanent damage to some people, and none of us would do that without making a solid effort to ascertain whether the bottom has a significant history that would make it unsafe, or limits that preclude it. Right? Otherwise, we’d be abusive or incompetent, right?

It is, perhaps, a testament to the internalisation of victim-blaming in Western society that I do, in fact, expect to get blamed if my car is left unlocked and subsequently gets stolen. So I lock my doors. At least if they’re locked, the police can’t dismiss me out of hand.

This is a metaphor for so many situations.

Eight years ago, I knew an abuser. He understood very well a) how to hurt people and b) how not to look bad doing it. He had no concept of boundaries. He got me smacked so hard in the elbow during SCA fight practice that I needed X-rays. (Which higher-ups later said was Not On, but somehow I still saw him at Ice Dragon. So much for sanctions.)

What hurt more, I think, was another woman subsequently blaming me for not being able to prevent what happened. Women saying these things to other women is not only a knife in the back, it’s twisting the knife, and oh did I mention the knife was poisoned? Because as much as it might happen to men, I notice that it’s women who have these stories. Well, women and anyone else who isn’t a straight cis male. In other words, this is another nasty manifestation of privilege, clawing one’s way to the top. “I got mine” indeed.

Zie who climbs zir way to the top of this particular heap with no regard for the hurts of others does not deserve to have a community of any kind. That behavior violates the social contracts we create in our cultures and subcultures. Zie who violates the contract forfeits the protections beyond basic human rights, in my eyes, and that goes for those whose ties to the violator apparently supersede ties to the rest of us.

And this is also why if I explore kink, I’ll do it the way you do: with my partner, without benefit of “orgs and parties”. I won’t be part of a subculture with such a broken social contract. I cannot withdraw from the greater culture supporting the breaking, but where I can choose, I will choose.

I do appreciate this. I was raped by a man in a BDSM setting. I was young and didn’t know enough to see what was happening. He made me vulnerable by asking me if I was curious about cuffs and asking me if I wanted to try them, and made me feel I could trust him by giving me a safeword. When he pushed me to far, I was unable to even fight back, and before I could even call safeword his hands were at my throat, I couldn’t breathe and he was warning me to never think of saying no to him. It took me YEARS to understand that I had been set up by a predator who understood exactly what he was doing. How was I going to go to the police after I agreed to the cuffs and after I agreed to some BDSM play? He knew he had me in a position where he could do anything, and I would have no way of fighting back, either in the moment or through legal means. That was 17 years ago. I’m still struggling to make my peace with it.

I wish that most of the people I know weren’t just going to ignore this the way they’ve ignored everything else that’s been said. I wish there was a good way to introduce this into the conversations of people who are so invested in the whole “I don’t do drama” thing that they can’t see what’s staring them in the face.

Thank you for this whole series. I ought to have realized in advance that the last post was going to cause some noise. As long as we talk about having these conversations in a very general sense, its fine. Its when it comes to even discussing the possiblity of us listening to survivors that the intense victim-blaming and defensiveness comes out. I keep wanting to ask, what are folks so very afraid of? The sad truth is, I think I know. Its easier and more convenient for folks to force victims to choke on their own silence. Frack that.

Thank you for writing this series. I’m not really part of the BDSM culture, but much of what you’ve said here easily applies to other nerd / social groups I’m part of (especially the tightly-knit ones) and the general culture at large. So much of the type of consent BDSM _says_ it’s about could be useful to other people, who may allow themselves to be drawn into “kinky sex” (or really ANY sex) without being told it’s acceptable to set boundaries and communicate explicitly about what they do or don’t want. This is a sentiment I’ve heard often. But if BDSM culture isn’t living by the example it wants to set, and if it allows people to be violated and silences them when they try to say so, then how is it going to convince other people that consent and communication _work_ and are worth doing? I’d love to be able to point to BDSM as an example of what the rest of us should strive for, without having a list of “except for”s and “although”s in the back of my throat. I sincerely hope that as time goes on things change, and that one day I can.

Oh man, this whole series has been great, and has stirred up some serious dirt in my brain.

I found your blog looking up practices on safe words, because I’m (at 26) about to have my first real kinky encounter. I’ve known I was very interested in this stuff since I was a teenager, at least, but guys who I’ve felt safe enough to ask for it tend to react pretty badly to requests for intentional pain or any whiff of “rape” with me wanting to fight bad, be held down, ect, (which is great of them but frustrating) so while I’ve been nominally tied up or halfheartedly spanked a few times, I’ve never gotten what I really crave. So me and a guy I recently started talking to are trying to negotiate boundaries and expectations and whatnot and I end up on your blog reading while I think about my answers.

And in attempting to lay out my limits and potential triggers, I had to think about when I lost my virginity when that guy that I was fooling around with stuck his dick in me without asking, from behind (he was fingering me before which is why I was positioned that way, this whole story is so horribly undignified) so it was a total surprise. He didn’t wear a condom. It hurt quite a lot, I was upset, I think I cried actually, but in a quiet way. But when I realized I was bleeding, I got up and went and cleaned myself off. *And then I came back to him* which I hated myself for, for a while, but I still feel very icky about. So I had to think about that again because as much as I hate telling that story, I felt like my partner deserved to be warned that I might freak out if he touches me that way in that position.

For a while after that, I called it date rape in my head. Then I didn’t, because I really want to think that he didn’t realize it upset me, that he didn’t INTEND to hurt me or upset me. That he simply misunderstood what was going on in the situation, I was 17, he was 21, and we got naked and he expected sex and I really should have clarified if I didn’t… and also, I would have fucked him if he’d have asked. Just not that way, not like that and not without a condom. And it would have been nice if he’d noticed he was hurting me. So yeah, I went a long time calling it “not rape” in my head. Because I didn’t want to feel like a victim, like I’d been raped. Plus, that seems like such a mild thing compared to “rape rape” as it were. And I feel like it’s really fucking problematic to admit to potential partners, since I am really turned on by the thought of, and want to do a forceful “rape” scene.

But reading through your site, especially some of the posts on the small percentage of repeat offenders, and the “mythcommunication” bit about not liking or not caring about the answers… I feel gross again. Like I can’t hand-wave his intentions away anymore. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I haven’t processed this, really, as a grownup. I have tried not to think about it for a good while. My bad experience has nothing to do with the kink community, just the culture at large, but we really do have a really bad problem with rape culture. I consider myself an ardent feminist, I’m an educated woman with a graduate degree in hard science, and if this story were told to me by a friend, I’d be outraged on her behalf. But I can just barely bring myself to poke around the edges of calling a spade a spade when it happened to me.

I’m sorry, I dunno if this was a TMI dump or not at all helpful or just a bad tangent.

Funny how often LC and I end up at the same places on Internet, if that’s the LC I think it is.

Wanted to say what an outstanding post this is, and that I will be doing my best to spread it around, because it’s a gorgeously and chillingly accurate picture of what rape culture is, how it works, how it’s enforced, how it’s created, how it’s maintained and supported.

I feel fortunate that my local group is run by a man with a solid and unflinching commitment to enthusiastic and active consent, and the culture of the group he’s created reflects that commitment, because it’s always been made clear to abusers that they’re socially unwelcome there.

That’s not to say abusers don’t come up – social enforcement is generally reactive, rather than proactive – but they are heavily opposed and criticized, and generally become unhappy and leave. I’ve been to other groups and events where this wasn’t the culture, and the difference was palpable. The latter felt generally unsafe, people were constantly groping others without anything being said, even when the groped person clearly didn’t want or appreciate the groping.

Me, I have a big mouth, and after years of street harassment, I’m willing to make a scene if someone behaves badly, but in that culture, even I felt silenced, and I have a strong commitment to enthusiastic consent in all things. I can only imagine how tough it must have been for a sub who, unlike me, doesn’t have the makeup to be able to do that without much concern for the social consequences. For me, subbing is a display of my strength of will and body, my unswerving willingness to endure to enjoy, so I have no internal conflict at being a strong, assertive person about my needs and boundaries even while subbing – but not everyone’s built that way.

Excellent post, thank you very much. I’m going to go back and read the whole series, I think.

I remember how, a few years ago, there actually was a case here in Sweden where two guys were sent to jail for beating up and raping a woman, after what started out as consensual BDSM. The woman had had sex with these two men on a few occasions before, and everything had been fine. Then one night the whole thing turned into rape and abuse. The evidence she had on her side was
– the testimony of her best friend, who had received a phone call from her that night, where she was terribly upset and said she’d been beaten up and raped
– physical injuries
– Text messages the two men had sent to each other the day after, where they wrote that the woman was “their whore” and they could do with her just as they pleased.
The two men were first acquitted, but the woman appealed to a higher court, and there they were convicted.

I remember discussing this case on an internet board with some Dom guy who felt sorry for the men because it’s SO DIFFICULT to know whether your partner consents or not, and maybe it was all a big misunderstanding. I got pissed off and told him that if he really thinks so he should go celibate.

Nobody is strong all the time. We all fail and we all get tired and worn. All we can do is what we can, with what we have, where we are. When that doesn’t seem like enough, I remember my favorite MLK quote: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”